Interview by Beppe Strambini

Beppe Strambini: There are a like a bunch of new tattooists that are very recognizable and you are one of them and there’s like a connection between all you guys… It looks like a family… can you talk about them… Xed, Hooper, Freddy, Filip…

Jondix: Xed, I was his customer many years ago and we become friends. He visited Barcelona every once in a while, we even did holidays together in Athens… He played the Tibetan conch at one of our concerts. He can do continuous breathing from didgeridoo. He’s fantastic. The king of psychedelic. He was the pioneer of dot work… the source… rotaries, patterns, e-Bay… Last year I gave him a gift -it was a tongue depressor with a natural hole on it, and I think he got pissed off? He’s a real artist… We have a big dialectic gap between tattooists… And I’m still not used to it…

It happens in all tattoo styles, but I think in dots, people know other tattooists better that the original ones like Xed…

Yes, it happens all the time, but for some reason I’ve started to like it… The good stuff is hidden, and more difficult to find. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like working in a fixed shop anymore… And of course if you publish a lot and become well known, then people will start copying you, it’s normal… Xed’s work has been copied to death, but every time we meet he has something new to blow my mind on his computer…

You are also a good friends with Hooper, and you both have similar but different approaches to tattooing… Did you start together?

Yes, but he’s darker and bigger… Victorian, as opposed to Mediterranean… Ha-ha. We discovered a lot of interesting things together; we’ve done a dozen collaborative paintings and tattoos… Since he moved to the States we have become more distant ‘cause he works in a different system with different rules.

You are one of the few people I’ve seen working with the Leu family…

I became friends with Rinzing and started visiting the studio in Lausanne years ago. They let me work with them as a guest and later on we did some conventions together… I’m just another customer, and big fan.

And how much does it influence you…

Well, when you see such perfect work in front of you, your mind changes forever…

Going back to drawing… How do you approach your designs? How do you get the shapes you want in geometric stuff? Why are you interested in it?

I love complexity… people were always saying straight lines and circles are difficult to tattoo, so that got my interest, and maybe having studied architecture for many years was also an influence, and being a customer of Xed. But honestly I’m trying to leave it all behind. I mean, I use it but as an extra tool, not as the main subject… We’ll see.

Maybe because you were born in Barcelona with —-? You have it in you and you don’t even know… For me as Italian, I have the Roman art.

Aha!

When you draw geometry on flat surface I understand, but how do you make it work on body shapes?

Deformation of the X or X axe, depending on with part F, the body…

Computer?

Xed Lehead and Tomas use the computer, me sometimes, but I prefer paper and scissors, ha-ha.

When I was working with you I was paying attention to how you built stuff with 30 photocopies and cut-and-pasted it to do those epic images… The preparation can take a lot of time, no?

Yes, yes… you have to be in a good mood… You don’t want to erase stencils. I hate it…

I have seen big pieces; you want first session all outline?

Yes, sometimes 10 hours meditation/preparation and than three hours of tattooing.